Rivals to the Regime

By

Joshua Rubenstein

Updated April 20, 2006 12:01 a.m. ET

Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, its former republics have been struggling to fashion their own national and cultural destinies. We routinely read of turmoil and dispute in Ukraine and Belarus, in Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. But what about Russia itself? It is too easy for Westerners to assume that Russia is a more or less fixed entity, politically in flux after forfeiting its imperial identity but otherwise deeply embedded in its long history and firm in its sense of itself.